CDN VS Cloud Storage: Which to Choose?

When it comes to serving up your website's content, you have two main options: Content Delivery Network (CDN) or Cloud Storage.

Both options can help accelerate the delivery of your website's static assets like images, CSS, and Javascript files. But which one is best for you?

Let's dive deep and help you decide!

CDN: A Closer Look

CDNs are geographically distributed server networks that cache your content (like images, videos, and HTML pages) across a global network of servers. When someone requests your website from a particular location, your CDN automatically routes them to the nearest server, helping to reduce latency and improve website performance.

For instance, if you're in New York, a user in Sydney will be routed to a server geographically closer to them, say, in Sydney, Shanghai, or Tokyo.

So, what's good about CDNs?

Advantages of CDNs

CDNs' benefits include the following:

• Faster website loading speeds thanks to the geographic distribution of the network that eliminates round-trip delays.
• Lower bandwidth costs as less bandwidth is used when serving content from a nearby CDN server.
• Higher availability and reliability thanks to the backups/snapshots of content on multiple servers within the network—providing a better end-user experience by reducing downtime.

However, CDN has its share of drawbacks.

Drawbacks of CDN

CDN's drawbacks include the following:

• More expensive than cloud storage.
• Not suitable for applications with multiple dynamic user-generated contents.
• Dependency on third-party servers may cause reliability issues.

Cloud Storage: A Closer Look

Cloud Storage, in contrast to CDNs, refers to the set of technologies and services that provide scalable and cost-efficient storage of data on third-party servers. Beyond this, cloud storage providers offer a wide range of value-added services like content delivery, analytics, security, and disaster recovery.

So, what's good about cloud storage?

Advantages of Cloud Storage

Cloud storage benefits include the following:

• Cost-effectiveness as you only pay for the storage and bandwidth usage.
• Suitable for hosting dynamic user-generated contents.
• High scalability as users can quickly scale up storage on-demand without having to invest in hardware upfront.

Cloud storage, too, has its fair share of drawbacks.

Drawbacks of Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage's limitations include the following:

• Limited geographic presence, which may lead to higher latency and longer loading times.
• Greater bandwidth costs when compared to CDN.

Now that you know the pros and cons of both CDN and Cloud Storage let's take a quick look at the comparison table below.

As you can see, knowing what you want is important when choosing between the two.

While CDNs offer better latency, scalability, and lower bandwidth costs, Cloud Storage is more cost-effective, scalable, and suitable for hosting dynamic user-generated content.

So, if your website has largely static contents and relies on the quick delivery of those contents, opt for CDN. On the other hand, if you host large files or user-generated files, or don't require speedy distribution, choose cloud storage.

References

• Azure. (n.d.). How to choose between Azure CDN and Azure Storage for your website. Microsoft. Retrieved from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-overview